A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Common Currencies on International Trade

NBER Working Paper No. 10373Issued in March 2004NBER Program(s): IFMITI

Thirty-four recent studies have investigated the effect of currency union on trade, resulting in 754 point estimates of the effect. This paper is a quantitative attempt to summarize the current state of debate; meta-analysis is used to combine the disparate estimates. The chief findings are that: a) the hypothesis that there is no effect of currency union on trade can be rejected at standard significance levels; b) the combined estimate implies that a bilateral currency union increase trade by between 30% and 90%; and c) the estimates are heterogeneous and not consistently tied to most features of the studies.

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